New Shazam Feature Tracks Artists’ Tags

Shazam has announced its newest product feature, intended to prove that “the biggest the stars in the world are also the biggest fans,” as the company’s statement put it.

The announcement centers around artist pages and a feed that will display what participants in the program — Alicia Keys, Tove Lo, Meghan Trainor, Robin Thicke, Maroon 5, Wiz Khalifa and 24 others to start — are Shazaming at the time. As users choose artists to follow within the platform, their home pages will reflect the recent tags of those artists.

More interesting to many close observers of artists’ careers is the making public of songs’ tag count.

The company announced the new feature at an event in Tribeca, as slim-suited tech sector participants watched a performance from Shaggy, sampled hors d’oeuvres, flutes of champagne and a signature cocktail.

You wouldn’t be insane to imagine that artists signed to Warner Music Group — who struck a data partnership with the company last year — got an email urging them to start using the app a little more regularly.

“We are here to celebrate a truly transformative launch,” Shazam CEO Rich Riley told the audience. “100 million users over the last month alone… and we recently crossed the milestone of 1 billion IDs.”

Whether the new feature will provide the magic the company is hoping for will remain to be seen for some time — as Chief Product Officer Daniel Danker told Billboard, the new product will become interesting once enough data has been amassed. And the wait may be especially so, considering the launch of Apple Music was hours away as Riley took the stage on that Manhattan rooftop.